The headlong pursuit by the Allied armies had all but wiped the Germans from the soil of France. They still held out desperately in the ports, determined to hamstring Allied supply to the bitter end. In tattered remnants of once-proud divisions they still fought bitter pocket skirmishes.
But by this week the Allies had smashed deep into the Low Countries and U.S. forces probed at the outer hedgehogs of the Siegfried Line. This week battles would boil on German soil.
Somewhere along the line the dazzling Allied advance might still have to slow up. U.S. advance elements had long outstripped their ground supply units, were moving and living, in part at least, on gasoline and other supplies dropped from aircraft. But the Germans could not be sure that there would be any stop. U.S. supply officers had already performed miracles.*
By all the old rules, the dash to Germany should have slowed up days ago, to consolidate and regroup units, let the quartermasters catch up. But this was an extraordinary operation: in the long history of wars the world had seen nothing like it before.
General Eisenhower, whose troops far to the rear fought and battered with redoubled fury to get more ports, seemed more concerned with the supply problem than with his next tactical effort: the Siegfried Line.
The West Wall was still an unknown quantity, but there were known factors:
¶ The Allies had weapons not contemplated in Corporal Hitler's 1939 conception of a West Wall. The Allies had new and proved techniques: multiplane bombardments, vastly developed artillery, flame-squirting tanks.
¶ The Allies had a formidable waiting army — the airborne legions of Lieut. Gen eral Lewis H. Brereton — for landings be hind any stubborn German defense line.
¶ There was evidence that the Germans, preoccupied with their strategy of holding Allied invasion to France's coastal areas, had stripped the West Wall of big guns to arm the Atlantic Wall.
Victories. The Allied landslide in France had engulfed almost everything, including the German strategy. The crack troops upon which the Germans had relied for orderly withdrawal to a hard line lay buried in the wreckage of the Normandy and Seine traps where the Battle of France had been won. What was left of the armored army guarding the robomb coast was cut off.
If the Germans had contemplated using at least the natural barriers of France's toothless, unreversed Maginot Line, that notion had been blown away by the advances of Lieut. General Omar Bradley's light-footed armies. Wherever the enemy might have planned to form at least a delaying line — the Meuse, the Somme, the Aisne, the Moselle—the barriers had been swept over before he could organize any defense in strength.
There was the possibility, perhaps too optimistic, that Allied speed alone might have frustrated the German plans for a stand on the Siegfried Line itself. The Allies thought of that barrier in terms of a few weeks. The Germans hoped in terms of months—until autumn rains and winter could slow the slashing tanks.